Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet
Subtitle: On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: August 29, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780299219444
Subjects: Biography: general; Travel writing; Travel; Biography / Autobiography; East Asia, Far East; Asia - Far East; Lesbian Studies; Personal Memoirs; Travel / Asia / Far East; Americans; China; Chinese speakers; English language; Intercultural communication; Shanghai; Study and teaching
Description: After accepting a job teaching English on a small engineering vessel traveling from Shanghai to Texas, Gillian Kendall embarks on a strange journey with no ports of call but exotic emotional landscapes. She is the only female aboard, surrounded by Chinese men. The cosmopolitan graduate student suddenly has to adjust to an alien world, thick with cigarette smoke, unusual sea creatures, and male sexuality. Kendall invites readers to travel with her across cultural divides as deep and mysterious as the Pacific while she explores her own culture, orientation, and heart. "Like all voyages worth taking, Gillian Kendall's odyssey across the Pacific is also a journey into the human heart. What a skillful navigator she is, never losing sight of her true destination."--Sy Safransky, Editor, The Sun.

"Mr. Ding's Chicken Feet is one of those rare memoirs that's both vividly nostalgic and utterly hilarious. A former Navy English teacher, author Gillian Kendall's flawless sense of comic pacing makes a book about life on the Tan Suo Zhe-a Chinese seismic vessel-teaching men to speak English as a foreign language so much more engrossing than one can imagine from the title (a reference to the crew's culinary delights). Affectionate and witty, Mr. Dings is a must read for armchair travelers and lit lovers alike."--Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor, Curve Magazine.